Monday 7 January 2008

King of pain





If you were Queen of pleasure
And I were King of pain
We'd hunt down Love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were Queen of pleasure
And I were King of pain.

(Swinburne - A Match)


6 comments:

  1. Beaty is simple. So it's the pleasure, so it's the pain.

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  2. Well, Nietzsche argued that the slave "knows blessedness (pleasure) only in no longer resisting anyone or anything" and called the Christianity (despised for its slave-morality) "a sublime further evolution of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid basis" (so brilliantly put :-) but this is Nietzsche :-). Nietzsche's slave fears the pain and this can end only in a religion of love, as he explains. However, he overlooks one simple (paradoxical?) thing: the slave's love for pain, that can only end in a religion of freedom. Pain is deliverance, and in pain the slave finds an absolute freedom, unknown to the master (again: paradoxically?). Because the master can never forget his will and responsibility, so ultimately he cannot experience the total abandon of self.

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  3. And yes, absolute freedom is absolute simplicity. But we will have to go to Zen to understand how this (kanso, 簡素, simplicity) can become also beauty and grace :-)

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  4. the comment is in the perfect association of the photograph and the poem, which is the comment of the photograph: "Love's unfulfilled promisses"

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  5. I recognize your nose.. :p

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  6. well, i wouldn't be so sure (this goes for your other comment as well, in which you think that you have recognized my back :-)
    not even people who know me in real life recognize me in my self-experiment photos :-)

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